What I’m Reading: The Workshop and the World

The Workshop and the World, by Robert P. Crease, is two books in one: a collection of biographies of important thinkers in history who contributed to what he terms the “scientific workshop,” by which he means the overall structure and authority of the scientific establishment, and a passionate but (I think) ultimately frustrating and unsuccessful polemic against what Crease calls science denial.

The two goals of the book are really intertwined. Crease believes that we live in an age of increa...